Microsoft warns the AI RAMmageddon could raise the price of Xbox Project Helix

There’s a particular kind of disappointment that comes not from bad news, but from someone delivering bad news with a smile and calling it honesty. Asha Sharma didn’t do anything wrong when she acknowledged that global memory shortages would likely push up the price of Xbox’s next console. She was just being straight with people. And yet, for a lot of Xbox fans, it still landed like a door quietly closing on something they’d been hoping for. A new era, moving fast Say what you want about the state of Xbox right now — the person running it is not coasting. Since taking over from Phil Spencer in late February, Sharma has moved with a kind of restless energy that the brand has frankly needed for a while. A widely mocked marketing campaign got binned almost immediately. The whole Microsoft Gaming identity got folded back into a cleaner, Xbox-led structure. Game Pass pricing got a meaningful trim. These aren’t reshuffles for the sake of optics. Something is actually shifting. Project Helix Microsoft Which makes her comments about Project Helix all the more worth paying attention to. When someone this decisive tells you pricing is going to be a problem, you probably shouldn’t wait around hoping she changes her mind. The global shortage of high-bandwidth memory — the kind increasingly being hoarded by AI infrastructure buildouts — is not an Xbox problem. It’s an everyone problem. But it becomes a very specific Xbox problem when you’re trying to launch a next-generation console into a market that already has a confidence deficit. Recommended Videos (function(){let containerEl=document.getElementById('dt-cnx-container-69f0905f2d42d');const deletePlayer=()=>{if(containerEl){containerEl.remove();containerEl=null}};if(!window.DT_RELATED_PLAYER_PROVIDER){deletePlayer();return} const iasAnId=decodeURIComponent('927851');if(!window.dtCNXReady){const loadIAS=()=>{return new Promise((resolve)=>{const e=document.createElement('script');e.src='https://static.adsafeprotected.com/vans-adapter-google-ima.js';e.onload=()=>{resolve()};document.head.appendChild(e)})};const loadCNX=()=>{return new Promise((resolve)=>{!function(n){if(!window.cnx){window.cnx={},window.cnx.cmd=[];var t=n.createElement('iframe');t.src='javascript:false';t.style.display='none',t.onload=function(){var n=t.contentWindow.document,c=n.createElement('script');c.onload=function(){window.dtCNXIframe=t;resolve()};c.src='//cd.connatix.com/connatix.player.js?cid=2a2352ef-fe98-483c-8897-aef587823f13',c.setAttribute('async','1'),c.setAttribute('type','text/javascript'),n.body.appendChild(c)};if(document.readyState!=='loading'){n.body.appendChild(t)}else{n.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){n.body.appendChild(t)})}}}(document)})};window.dtCNXReady=()=>{if(!window.dtCNXReadyPromise){window.dtCNXReadyPromise=new Promise((resolve)=>{Promise.all([iasAnId?loadIAS():Promise.resolve(),]).then(()=>loadCNX()).then(()=>{resolve()})})} return window.dtCNXReadyPromise}} const disableFloating=()=>{let playerAPI=window.DTConnatixPlayers&&window.DTConnatixPlayers['dt-cnx-player-69f0905f2d42c'];if(playerAPI){playerAPI.disableFloatingMode()}else{DTEvent.on('dt-connatix-player-ready',()=>{playerAPI=window.DTConnatixPlayers['dt-cnx-player-69f0905f2d42c'];if(playerAPI){playerAPI.disableFloatingMode()}})}};window.dtDampenPlayerCallbacks=window.dtDampenPlayerCallbacks||{};window.dtDampenPlayerCallbacks['dt-cnx-player-69f0905f2d42c']=deletePlayer;const lazyLoad=()=>{return new…

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